System administrators responsible for managing information technology (IT) environments can face difficult tasks. Managing IT environments may involve monitoring and maintaining IT resources and assets such as client operating systems, databases, servers, client computing devices and so forth. Typically, operational data collected from the above mentioned resources and assets is stored in a live database. Configuration information, availability, and health status, are examples of operational data. System administrators view the operational data to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the IT environment. Over a period of time, the amount of operational data stored in the live database can become large (e.g. terabytes/gigabytes) and system administrators may find the data difficult to navigate.
Typically, the data stored in the live database is periodically transferred to a historical database. This allows the live database to maintain smaller amounts of data which allow system administrators to access the data easily and efficiently.
Historical data stored in the historical database includes archived live data collected over long periods of time. System administrators also use historical data for monitoring and troubleshooting IT environments. Although system administrators have access to historical data covering longer periods of time than the live data, the historical data may not include as much detailed information as the live data. The data stored in the historical database is usually consolidated, groomed, and optimized for storage and user access. This usually results in the loss of some detailed data. For example, live data collected for a client's CPU utilization may include over a thousand data points during a 24 hour time period. When the live data is transferred to the historical database, the average (or hourly average) of the data points may be stored in the historical database as opposed to storing all of the associated data points.
Typically, system administrators have interacted with live data and historical data using separate views into these live and historical databases (e.g., separate consoles or separate database sessions). In one scenario, a user would interact with live data using a first view. When the user wanted to interact with historical data, the user would manually provide information about the historical database and specify exactly what information the user wanted to view and/or interact with before a second view was created displaying the historical data.
In a similar scenario, a user would interact with historical data using a first view. When the user wanted to interact with live data, the user would provide contextual information about the live database and specify exactly what information the user wanted to view and/or interact with before a second view was created displaying the live data.
The user experience described in the above mentioned scenarios is inefficient and burdensome for users. As a result, it can be challenging for users to easily utilize data stored in a live database and a historical database in a meaningful manner for monitoring and troubleshooting IT environments.